A room to entertain

Our dining room is one of the few rooms in the house that you have to travel through to get to any other place. It's also the room that we'd like to spend lots and lots of time with friends and family making memories over the next 20 years. With this is mind we wanted to do something really fun with that room, especially in terms of color. I posted previously about our inspiration for color in the dining room and we LOVE how it turned out! We didn't have to make any big renovations to the room, but I think we dramatically changed the feeling by adding color and a few new touches.

Here's how we did it!

This is how things looked from the closet looking into the living room (where that clothes rack is!)... more antique white. Yuck. And that light fixture, ew.

View from the doorway, the kitchen is up on the left and the closet is back to the right.

To us, the whole room was one-note. But painting this room was no easy task. I decided I wanted TWO colors! And a chair rail! And, and, and... hold on. This room, while only 12 x 14 has two closets, two windows and THREE doorways -- so that's a lot of intersecting lines and geometry to work with. Neither of us have ever cut, painted, or installed a chair rail and our house is 110 years old (aka, not even a little bit straight). But we rolled up ourselves and got started.

Zach measures roughly (we had to measure and level this line a bazillion times) for the chair rail so we had a stopping point for the top color. We painted the ceiling a very, very pale whitish-blue to coordinate with the walls and I taped off the ceiling.

And then I taped off ALL OF THE THINGS! Seriously, so much taping. I am pretty skilled at cutting in, but I'm also a perfectionist and I wanted this done in 2012, so we taped for speed!

Top color goes on, and we're in love. I also painted inside the china cabinet for continuity, plus we like how it shows off our fancy glasses!

Hugo was very bored indeed that this project took longer than expected.

After this point, we got stuck for about a week. We hadn't picked out the chair rail yet, and we couldn't really paint the bottom until that was ready to go up. We eventually picked out a pretty thick chair rail with some curves (there were enough straight lines in the room already) and we didn't want anything too skinny or it would look cheap/like a mistake. Zach cut everything down on his Dad's miter saw and he primed everything for me! I don't have any photos of how we installed the rail itself, partially because it was nearly relationship-ending. I'm kidding, of course, but it was really frustrating... we couldn't measure from the baseboards, the windows, or the floor (they're ALL crooked) and we felt like only one wall in the room was even remotely square so we used that as our guide and sort of winged it the rest of the way. I have a really good eye for leveling/centering things (several years of being a picture framer installed that function), but there were parts of the room that even with our laser level and my eye confirming that things were straight, they looked like they were a full inch off. Agh! We got our chalk line as close as we could and started hanging the rail piece by piece using our sort-of-square wall as a starting point. We used liquid nails to hold it in place while we leveled it, and Zach tapped in a few finishing nails at each stud. We let it cure overnight and I filled in the nail holes with some wood filler and put a line of paint-able caulk along the wall where the rail meets the top color (I didn't worry about doing one underneath because no one is ever going to see that). After sanding the extra filler and caulk off it was ready to paint! We did three coats on the rail and two on the walls (we actually painted one coat on before the rail went up to be sure that the paint looked seamless). We feel like if we're going to paint, we might as well be as thorough as possible, because yes that patch where you can kinda see the paint underneath would make me insane.

What you've been waiting for, some gratuitous after photos.

The room looks so silly with my tiny table! This was from my small South Philly row home! The chairs I found on Craigslist and refinished/reupholstered -- I'll be so sad to see them leave!

View from the main entrance

Nearly the same view, a touch tighter.

We loooove our built in cabinet (it hides the booze and displays our pretty glasses!)

Curvy chair rail!

Want to see something swoonworthy?

This freakishly perfect line where the chair rail meets the wall. There's a painting trick to this which is super easy and you don't have to buy the wicked expensive tape!

You may have also noticed that we changed out the switch plates (bought in bulk) and found a new chandelier that is more our style. We fell in love with this:

It's from Pottery Barn and it's $400. Sad face. That's not even remotely in our budget and for the time being we try to limit our expenses to things that can be purchased at Lowes or flea markets.

As luck would have it Lowes had something similar enough made by Allen + Roth (seriously, I could be a spokesperson that that line) and it was less that half the price, plus another 5% off.

It doesn't have nearly as many jars, but our room isn't that big to begin with and after installing this we realized that it's really bright. We're going to switch the 60W bulbs out with some 40W Edisons when we can. Also, You can switch out the out-of-the-box jars with any wide mouth mason jar!

We're so happy with room and we haven't even had anyone over yet! We can't wait to finally decide what to hang and where (we both have lots and lots of art work). We're both excited about making lots of happy memories with friends and family around a big farmhouse table (to be continued...)

If I squint my eyes small enough I can almost see it now!